If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present

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Sentence after sentence, Clark’s observations can be unforgettable, as when he spots the “tremendous synecdoche” of the “little underworld” beneath the table in the Musée d’Orsay’s Card Players, ca. Not unlike those of Sebald or Brecht (or Berlant), Clark’s gestures function as demonstrations of method foremost. There is a Cézanne who cannot be captured by “‘history,’ ‘ideology,’ and ‘production,’” but he might not be the Cézanne of our present. In Cézanne’s Gravity, a book comparable to Clark’s in its summary gaze, Armstrong sought to redeem the artist in part through an interdisciplinary approach, where if Cézanne in his strangeness could be brought to bear on Einstein’s physics or Woolf’s fiction, he could be released from the teleological prison of modernist painting and gain newfound relevance. Some of the book's themes do make sense, but one has to wade through so much drivel and spend some time filtering it out, that you feel cheated of your precious time by this author.

It’s unclear what experts on the artist might glean from these sustained poetics besides the pleasures of rhetorical figuration, or if the casual readers presumed by the phalanx of copies available for sale at the Tate Modern’s current Cézanne exhibition exist in practice. Another is a watchful explication of the cardplayer paintings that originated as a catalogue essay, while “Cézanne’s Material,” on the still lifes, works through a series of journal entries Clark wrote in 2016, not unlike the technique of his 2008 book, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. It is delightful to see that he introduces a new lexicon for the artist’s work, for example in the description of the “fulcrum" of the effect of the Getty’s Still Life in chapter two – a word that also describes the Card Players in chapter four, entitled Peasants – which is distinct from the “punctum”, used by the French philosopher Roland Barthes on photography. For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management.And maybe they strike me as the picture’s fulcrum because they and the edge of the blue material are so much an image – an epitome – of containment, of firm holding, two shapes nicely settled. Texts on the artist are often about themselves, and faced with the French paragon, Clark wields his usual rhetorical arsenal. Now, extending the analysis of The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing ( Clarke 2008), his exercise in extended close looking at Nicolas Poussin’s art, he discusses some paintings by Paul Cézanne.

Such concentrated focus could be said to honor what the artist did and wanted, but this tact risks privatizing interpretation, hemming the work in to the lines and shapes of individual perception. He experiences Cézanne’s paintings as the very embodiment of modernity – understood as an irresolvable contradiction, an ‘interminable to-and-fro’.Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. will be constantly, vitally, discontentedly present in the writing we do, as the reality our writing moves toward and always misses. For the artist’s crowning achievement, a series of works based on a monumental mountain, the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, stood for a particular sense of history; the south was associated with a new classicism. An illuminating analysis of the work of Paul Cézanne, one of the most influential painters in the history of modern art, by T.

If These Apples Should Fall doesn’t so much answer this scholarship or correct an art-historical course as it distends the scholar’s moments of study into an elaborated, loping encounter with the artist’s work. Paul Cezanne (1839 – 1906) was a French artist who played a pivotal role in the development of modern art. Clark is particularly strong on telling details, and his insights into Pissarro, in the first main chapter, are an added bonus.

J. Clark looks back on Cézanne from a moment – our own – when such judgments may seem to need justifying. Most of the chapters derive from texts written years ago, and all the pulsations of the present day—its politics, crises, and fashions—ring somewhere beyond the book’s ambit.

Clark is less concerned with rescuing Cézanne: This art, he suggests, will unfold in its own present of vision and paint and unfastening form. His first solo show, with Ambroise Vollard in Paris in 1895, marked a transition for the artist as he cultivated a unique modern style. The introduction even hazards some poetry written by a teenage Clark in the 1950s: “Look at the playing card fields and the tallest tree, raising its stubby hands / In prayer or surrender.This new book takes you very closely into Clark’s mind in what amounts to an extended interior monologue.